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This is Karen Schnell [KS], the date is February 28, 1989. I am interviewing George Colton [GC], former Chair of the Board Trustees.
KS: Mr. Colton, when did you first become involved with Skidmore College?
GC: I believe it was 1972 when Joe Palamountain journeyed over to Hanover and asked me if I would go on the Board and that surprised me, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do, so I said, "Sure, why not?" Then I came over for my first visit; I didn't know Skidmore. I knew lots of Skidmore alumnae. Some of my classmates at Dartmouth had married them and I had just known them for a long time. But I'd never been on the campus. I knew Joe because he was a Dartmouth alumnus too, but it was a totally new experience at that point.
KS: Did you come on for financial expertise?
GC: No one ever explained to me exactly why I got invited to go on the Board, but I think I could figure that out without too much trouble. Skidmore had had some kind of a fundraising campaign that had bombed, more or less. And I suspect that somebody on the Board said, "Why don't we get somebody on the Board that knows something about fundraising?" And with Joe Palamountain being Dartmouth, George Davis, who was then chairman of the Executive Committee, being Dartmouth and Jim Ingersoll also Dartmouth, I think probably somebody said, "Well there's Colton over there, he must know something about it; at least Dartmouth thinks he does, so why don't we get him?" I assume that's just about what happened.
KS: Were you the Vice President for Financial Affairs at Dartmouth?
GC: No, Alumni Relations and Development, the same role Chris [Hoek] plays here.
KS: So you then came onto the Board in 1972. Some of the situations facing the Board at that time obviously were, first and foremost, a dire financial situation.
GC: Yeah, we were running deficits at that point. We turned that around shortly thereafter. But the College had been running deficits for some time. Largely, not because of bad management, but because of the move to the new campus. The financial requirements of getting the buildings up and beginning to function over here, they just couldn't raise money fast enough to do it and stay in the black. But that did get turned around in a few years. We were still dealing with coeducation, that was in '72, that had been coeducational what, six years-
KS: One year by then
GC: Yeah, that's right, '71 I guess. So, you know, there were the problems of doing away with parietals, all the problems of suddenly having young men bouncing around the campus- and not too many of them at that point. We started with a very small, oh maybe 10% male or something. It was a very small percent. Joe and the Board had decided not to do what Vassar did and go out and do a big recruiting job on males, but to try to let them come if they really had an interest and let it grow. And I think that was, as it turned out, probably a very wise way to do it. At least, the places that did it differently tended to have more trouble with it, I think, than Skidmore did. It would have been nice to have had more men in the early years, but it took care of itself fairly rapidly.
KS: Was the decision to go coed in part for financial reasons, or was it more just to continue to attract accomplished women?
GC: I was not a party to the discussions so I can only surmise that it must have been a reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, that increasingly it was going to be difficult to maintain a single sex institution in the world as it was evolving. And since it was true then, and still is, that Skidmore is so heavily tuition and fee driven, any possibility that the size of the student body would go down instead of up as it did would have been disaster. So I just have to assume they could see the handwriting on the wall. So both out of financial reasons and I suppose out of some sense of what they thought was really the right thing to do anyway, they made the decision.

George Colton served on the Board of Trustees from 1972 until 1986. He was Vice President emeritus at Dartmouth when President Palamountain personally approached him to serve on Skidmore’s Board of Trustees after some failed fund raising attempts by the College. Colton was instrumental in organizing and implementing Skidmore’s Wide Horizon Campaign, which raised over $13 million, and which then spring boarded into the even more successful Celebration Campaign.

This is Karen Schnell [KS], the date is February 28, 1989. I am interviewing George Colton [GC], former Chair of the Board Trustees.
KS: Mr. Colton, when did you first become involved with Skidmore College?
GC: I believe it was 1972 when Joe Palamountain journeyed over to Hanover and asked me if I would go on the Board and that surprised me, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do, so I said, "Sure, why not?" Then I came over for my first visit; I didn't know Skidmore. I knew lots of Skidmore alumnae. Some of my classmates at Dartmouth had married them and I had just known them for a long time. But I'd never been on the campus. I knew Joe because he was a Dartmouth alumnus too, but it was a totally new experience at that point.
KS: Did you come on for financial expertise?
GC: No one ever explained to me exactly why I got invited to go on the Board, but I think I could figure that out without too much trouble. Skidmore had had some kind of a fundraising campaign that had bombed, more or less. And I suspect that somebody on the Board said, "Why don't we get somebody on the Board that knows something about fundraising?" And with Joe Palamountain being Dartmouth, George Davis, who was then chairman of the Executive Committee, being Dartmouth and Jim Ingersoll also Dartmouth, I think probably somebody said, "Well there's Colton over there, he must know something about it; at least Dartmouth thinks he does, so why don't we get him?" I assume that's just about what happened.
KS: Were you the Vice President for Financial Affairs at Dartmouth?
GC: No, Alumni Relations and Development, the same role Chris [Hoek] plays here.
KS: So you then came onto the Board in 1972. Some of the situations facing the Board at that time obviously were, first and foremost, a dire financial situation.
GC: Yeah, we were running deficits at that point. We turned that around shortly thereafter. But the College had been running deficits for some time. Largely, not because of bad management, but because of the move to the new campus. The financial requirements of getting the buildings up and beginning to function over here, they just couldn't raise money fast enough to do it and stay in the black. But that did get turned around in a few years. We were still dealing with coeducation, that was in '72, that had been coeducational what, six years-
KS: One year by then
GC: Yeah, that's right, '71 I guess. So, you know, there were the problems of doing away with parietals, all the problems of suddenly having young men bouncing around the campus- and not too many of them at that point. We started with a very small, oh maybe 10% male or something. It was a very small percent. Joe and the Board had decided not to do what Vassar did and go out and do a big recruiting job on males, but to try to let them come if they really had an interest and let it grow. And I think that was, as it turned out, probably a very wise way to do it. At least, the places that did it differently tended to have more trouble with it, I think, than Skidmore did. It would have been nice to have had more men in the early years, but it took care of itself fairly rapidly.
KS: Was the decision to go coed in part for financial reasons, or was it more just to continue to attract accomplished women?
GC: I was not a party to the discussions so I can only surmise that it must have been a reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, that increasingly it was going to be difficult to maintain a single sex institution in the world as it was evolving. And since it was true then, and still is, that Skidmore is so heavily tuition and fee driven, any possibility that the size of the student body would go down instead of up as it did would have been disaster. So I just have to assume they could see the handwriting on the wall. So both out of financial reasons and I suppose out of some sense of what they thought was really the right thing to do anyway, they made the decision.